Saturday, October 26, 2013

Dessa Unplugged

Even if you’d never heard a single hip-hop track by Dessa, and knew nothing about her, you’d probably walk away from her recent event as
part of the Talk of the Stacks series liking her as a person. That’s where I’m
coming from. That’s what I did.

I was familiar with the name only due to the heavy Facebook
advertising RainTaxi sent out about her recent book launch at the Walker Art
Center. When I saw she’d be appearing at the downtown library, I listened to
one or two tracks on her website—neither of them to the end. I like them both,
but didn’t immerse myself.

Hilary is out of town, so I called a friend and suggested we
meet for Happy Hour at Origami before the event.

“Sounds like a good idea,” he said. “I was planning to go anyway. I have two of
Dessa’s CDs.”

This means that Tim is hip and I’m not. Or it means that Tim
has adult children and I don’t. Or that Tim is into all sorts of music more deeply
than I am. Or all of the above.

I am deeply
immerse in the Talk of the Stacks
scene. The series is altogether pleasant and I’ve been to six or seven events. There
is something totally agreaable about a good Happy Hour meal at Origami, a nice
stroll through a few blocks of downtown (now improved by the sight of colorful stacks of fruit just inside the glittering window of the new Whole Foods supermarket), a free reading in an elegant library with a bit of
buzz to it...and free cookies of the chocolate-covered Pepperidge Farm type.

(It was a bit naive of me to imagine the wine they served
after the event would also be free. But everything else was going so well!)

Dessa was introduced as the first musician to appear at Talk
of the Stacks, but the written word, in the form of her first book of poetry, A Pound of Steam, was the evening’s focus. Eric Lorborer, the Rain Taxi publisher and impresario,
sat across from her on-stage, asking her questions about the origin of this or
that poem. This gave Dessa the opportunity to describe her approach to writing.
She records snatches of conversation and later puts them into categories,
depending upon whether they have potential as prose, poetry, or song lyrics. At
one point she referred to the “butterfly net" she used to scoop up material out
of the surrounding public space, and gestured evocatively from her chair as she
did so. One of the next words out of her mouth was “mosaic.”

I’m sure Eric was lapping this up, because he’s a big fan of
Surrealist literature, and the technique is not dissimilar to those the Surrealists
often used, and probably still do.

As far as I can tell, Dessa isn’t much of a surrealist,
however. Her work seems to be rooted in coherent narratives. And it strikes me
that her rap performances carry a harsh, rough, edge and stuttering, explosive
rhythms very much unlike the dreamy illogicalities of a Desnos or a Reverdy.
The three or four poems she read were fair but somewhat lacking in pulse, as
if, stepping away from her rapper stance, she’d lost touch with her inner core.
I was reminded (though on a different level of achievement) of Duke Ellington,
who in various jazz suites of the 50s and 60s strove for “long-hair” respectability
but jettisoned a great deal of dance-hall swing in the process.

Throughout the evening it was interesting to listen to Dessa
formulate elaborate sentences virtually free of cliché, in response to questions
she’d been asked before, but seemed to be answering for the first time, or at
least to be reflecting on anew, more fearful of sounding inauthentic or being untruthful
than of exposing herself too much. Humor and integrity, insight and uncertainty.
It’s obvious Dessa enjoys the workings of her own mind and is sometimes
surprised and delighted by what comes out. But her inner censor is usually on high
alert, and in response to one of Eric’s questions, she described in painful
detail, how excruciating she sometimes finds it, attempting to select from
between six or seven responses she might make in a given situation upon which
her personal happiness is riding. Her biggest fear, it seems, is that she'll start sounding sentimental. (I'd like to hear a little more sentiment from her myself.)

The event took on a higher level of interest, I think,
during the question-and-answer period, when there was less about literary
matters and more of Dessa being herself. Young fans asked her intelligent
questions about her career, her life-style, how her gender affects how she’s
perceived and what she’s done to navigate and exploit such perceptions to make
sure she gets her message across.

Dessa has a degree in philosophy from the U of M, and one fan asked her who, among that crowd, had influenced her work.

"I hate Kant," she replied. (Good for her!) It seems that the thinkers she's been most inspired by are not the dark and sometimes poetic Continental existentialists, as we might expect from an artist belonging to a collective called Doomtree, but the British analytic and utilitarian philosophers.

"I don't necessarily agree with their conclusions," she said, "but I like the ways they use the language."

One of my favorites questions came from a young woman in the
first row: Why is it that so many more
people like songs and song lyrics than written poetry? Her two-fold response
was, people ought to explore written
poetry more thoroughly…and poets ought to make a better effort to reach new
audiences.

Dessa is moving in the other direction, stretching beyond her base
in music in an attempt to reach a new audience that might find it difficult acclimatizing
itself to a synthesized studio sound or a rapper’s beat.

About Me

The Macaroni blog is dedicated to the subjects that have enlivened the print edition of Macaroni for more than twenty-five years - travel, films, food, ideas, music ... you name it. My name is John Toren. I write the blog. If you're interested in lengthier forays into the same fields track down a copy of my new book,All the Things You Are or my previous book By the Way. For a closer look at the state of Minnesota, check out my travel book, The Seven States of Minnesota.